Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

When their schedules permit, President Obama has lunch with Vice President Biden every week in the West Wing's Private Dining Room, where a painting by George P.A. Healy dominates the west wall.

In it, President Lincoln is central — leaning forward, chin in hand, attentive but pensive. To his right, legs crossed, is Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. To his left, Admiral of the Navy David Dixon Porter.

But the man clearly in command of the room is William Tecumseh Sherman, sitting erect, doing all the talking, and seemingly putting his thumb and finger together in a pincer motion.

The painting is called The Peacemakers.

"Peacemaker" may seem an odd epithet for Sherman, the Union general whose name has become synonymous with war. This was the man they named a World War II tank after, who coined the famous phrase "war is hell," but almost in the same breath offered to go to into battle one more time if need be.

To this day, historian Robert L. O'Connell writes, Sherman "stands indicted as one of the originators of what is termed 'total war' — wholesale assaults on civilian populations as an integral part of military strategy." Reviled in the South for leaving a swath of destruction during his march to the sea during the Civil War, and remembered on the Great Plains for his attempts to render buffalo extinct in order to force the removal of American Indians, there's a case to be made for Sherman as a war criminal — certainly by modern sensibilities.

But in Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, O'Connell largely exonerates him. "Sherman was a hard and determined man, but not a cruel one," O'Connell says. "Sherman waged war to win, never simply to destroy."

Sherman's legacy is more complicated than his modern caricature. Yes, his army was a destructive force, breaking up railroad tracks, heating them over fire, and bending them around trees as "Sherman's neckties" to make sure they couldn't be reused. But he also was responsible for the transcontinental railroad, linking and unifying the country. North vs. South, East joined with the West.

After that famous meeting with Lincoln's war council depicted in The Peacemakers, it was Sherman who offered generous terms of surrender to Confederate Gen. Joe Johnston. The terms were too generous for Northern sensibilities, resulting in newspaper coverage so intense that the controversy threatened to overshadow even Lincoln's assassination.

O'Connell's biography is unconventional and multifaceted, organized thematically rather than chronologically. By untangling Sherman the strategist from Sherman the leader and Sherman the husband, Fierce Patriot gives a more three-dimensional picture of his fiery but magnetic personality.

Half the book gives Sherman the traditional Civil War general treatment: campaigns, battles, chess moves — all with huge numbers of nameless casualties. But then it diverges into two even more fascinating discursions.

Understanding Sherman means understanding his army, O'Connell says, so the first diversion is a bottom-up account of the Civil War through the eyes of Sherman's soldiers, who called him "Uncle Billy." It was a democratic army, made up of unfit volunteers hardened into a disciplined fighting force, improvising and innovating along the way.

The second is the intriguing relationship between Sherman and his wife. The marriage was a psychodrama from the beginning — he married his stepsister, after all — but was compounded by family ambition, religion, politics and affairs.

Fierce Patriot is the best kind of biography, filled with insights beyond a mere recitation of events. In an epilogue, O'Connell acknowledges that academic historians like himself struggle with the meaning of events, often producing works unreadable for a general audience. Popular writers are better storytellers but often miss the bigger historical context.

O'Connell manages to balance the two but recognizes that his complicated subject can't be summed up in 432 pages. He ends the book with this thought: "If you don't like this Sherman, wait a while, there's bound to be another. He's too important to forget."

Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh ShermanBy Robert L. O'ConnellRandom House3½ stars out of four